The Outcome

The Story

Mr. Smith has requested a meeting with the team on behalf of his employer. The team has something his boss wants, and Mr. Smith has something the team wants.

They set up a meet at the Seattle Yacht Club for 9:00 pm that evening to talk things over.

As it turns out, Mr. Smith had the recently deceased Kasey. Turns out she survived her magma bath in The Prodigal Daughter, but it burned out her regenerative abilities. To what extent, they weren’t sure.

Mr. Smith’s boss, Jonathan Maverich, showed up and said he wasn’t looking to trade. Quite the contrary, he helped Kasey as return of a favor for a past action (see The Astral Quest (Parts 1-3)).
He then asked for the digital copy of the Book of Harrow that THX had distributed to the team after snatching it.
Venus handed that copy over to Maverich and that was that.

As luck would have it, Maverich had some work for the runners. His team was wrapped up in another engagement after the meet at the Yacht Club ended, and there was something that required attention this very evening. The freighter Free Taiwan had been hijacked by pirates and was off course. If the ship wasn’t recovered by morning, Knight Errant would send a team out to the boat to recover it.

This was not ideal.
Nor was the thought of pirates keeping the ship. Maverich was willing at the very least to recover the boat. Ridding the contents of container GGK9902314 would earn an extra payday for the team.

After some questions to clarify the goals of the job (after Ms. Shadow not giving complete information), the team agreed to the terms and the run was on.

The first order of business was to secure transport to the Free Taiwan. It was presently 200 km northwest of Seattle. Getting out there would require transport of some kind. The team settled on stealing a sailboat. Kasey managed to sneak onto the boat, and THX was able to convince the sailboats pilot program to take it out. The rest of the team loaded on board and they were off.

Venus called up a spirit of water to conceal the boat, give it movement, and to call up a fog around the freighter. Ta’Lon then used a spirit of air to have the team board the boat after THX took care of the on board security. Something was piloting the freighter, and it wasn’t the on-board pilot program. Thankfully, THX was able to skirt whatever it was while in the node.

Meanwhile, on deck, the team swept the ship, finding three metahumans on board. Two elf women who were wearing uniforms indicating they worked on the boat. The third was a human in a half wet suit. These three were all high at the moment, and thus easy to subdue (via hog ties). Venus mind-probed the human, and found that he belonged to the Tasmanian Devil Surf gang. He was attempting to surf from Seattle to Baja and had found THEPERFECT wave when the freighter ruined it. Knowing that the freighter was mostly unmanned, he boarded and took over the boat.
Finding the two women on board, he did the typical “threatening pirate” act, which frightened the two young elven women to tears. So he decided to party with them instead of locking them up. They were all currently sleeping off the effects of BLISS when the team arrived.

Knowing that there wasn’t anyone else on board, the team moved to investigate cargo container GGK9902314 while THX worked on correcting the boat’s course. THX managed to scare off whatever was driving the boat by throwing Bitcoins at it. Once the “pirate” program was gone, the freighter’s on-board Pilot program took control again and changed the command codes (thus locking THX out of the system).
The team recovered one of the commlinks from the elven girls and gave the code to THX to use to operate the cranes so they could access GGK9902314. Accessing the ship’s manifest, said container was owned by Bozhevillya (божевілля) Conglomerate.

Ta’Lon did some astral recon and checked out the container before they opened it. Within were 14 cylindrical tubes. 12 were roughly 2 m long, and 1 m high and stacked three high in two rows. The other two capped the end of the container and were larger and stacked two high. Once recovered, Kasey cracked the maglock and they opened it up.
Having something of a crisis of conscience, the team didn’t want to destroy the tubes without knowing what was in them, so Venus astral projected and poked her head in one to see. She was greeted by living person in some kind of hibernation.
Mind probing the target, she asked who it was “We are no one”.
What is it’s first memory: “You asking who we are”
What is your purpose: (no response)

About this time, the lights in the tube started coming online, and the team freaked.
[what follows is technically a breach of the rules, only bound spirits can perform remote services].
Venus then summoned up a spirit and ordered it to engulf a tube, and drop it into the Mariana Trench. It could only do one at a time. So Venus began chain summoning spirits to carry tubes to the Trench. Ta’Lon, meanwhile, began calling up spirits to move the tubes into the water and crush them.
Once all the tubes were emptied from the container, Venus summoned up several more spirits to further crush the tubes Ta’Lon’s spirits handled, and take them to the trench as well. They then had an spirit of air clean out the interior of the container and replaced it into the ship’s hold.

With the Free Taiwan recovered, they freed the two elven women and took “Shark” to their boat to free at a later point. They then sailed back to Seattle to collect their payment.
True to his word, once the Free Taiwan docked, the Ares Credit was released to the team.